What is the Cloud
Nowadays, most companies Almost every company uses a computer nowadays to accomplish major aspects of their business. The more successful a company is, the more computers it they’ll end up needing in order to process the growing pools of data and processes. Then comes the inevitable decision to start a data center on premise or move to the cloud.
What is the cloud?
While the servers and computers that you use locally are physically located in your building, cloud servers are “online” and you don’t have to individually maintain them. Services like AWS (Amazon Web Service) host and scale your data automatically. It’s the plug and play of servers, and you don’t have to be as in the weeds.
What does cloud storage offer you?
The single largest benefit of cloud storage is maintenance. You don’t have to worry about sizing the system correctly, you don’t have to worry about redundancy; the cloud is a low maintenance system. Simply put, you put data in and let someone else worry about the logistics. No matter how complex your system or large your data, a cloud system is designed to handle it. The data is automatically put into redundant servers so you won’t lose anything. Ever. As a business owner, this means that you no longer have to worry about right-sizing, backups, migrations, or software upgrades making your data inaccessible.
Another major benefit of cloud warehousing is accessibility. If your data is located in your building, then you have to be on the network to access it. If you’re out of the office working with a client that means you need to VPN into your network get to your data. If your data is in the cloud, you can access it anytime from anywhere. Don’t misunderstand: your data is very safe, but it’s able to be accessed from anywhere you happen to set up office.
The final big benefit of online data hosting is encryption. If your data is on your premises locally it may or may not be encrypted depending on how you configured it. In the cloud, the standard has become to encrypt data at rest. Meaning that data is stored as meaningless gibberish unless you log in and authenticate yourself. At that point, the data is decrypted for your use and re-encrypted as soon as you’re done. This provides a great deal of security and makes sure your data is safe from malicious use, or accidental leakage.
Benefits of going to the cloud.
Imagine being at a client site and you need to access your financials to ensure you have the capital to move forward. If your financial management program were hosted onsite like QuickBooks local, you’d be out of luck. But knowing that the cloud is the easier solution, your data is online and you can access your financials anywhere anytime. This works even more effectively if you’re working with a business intelligence company such as Systematic Solutions as they can get your data anytime and refresh it as often as you need. Instead of having us come on site to pull data, a cloud solution allows us to work with the data faster, giving you answers more efficiently.
To Recap
Hosting your data in the cloud is a decision that can help increase data availability, security, and integrations. Done properly, it can decrease your IT workload and increase the time you spend focusing on your business. Reach out the data specialists at Systematic Solutions and see how we can help you with your data solutions.